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Monday, April 23, 2012

A to Z: Tiny Tigers

Tiny Tigers? Well, in a way.

What happens when you have a species that goes from wild to domesticated, then members of the species go back to being feral? The domestic house cat seems quite comfortable doing this.
They seem adept at straddling the line between domestic and wild when on their own.

I love to travel. I love animals. When I travel I miss my pets. When I travel I see and meet lots of stray animals. You can see where this is going.
When traveling if I see an animal I have to stop, take pictures, see if I can't meet them and make friends.
In 2010 Inka was very convinced we'd end up with 100 cats and other animals!

Since it is Monday, people are going through withdrawals from coming back from Salute and Adepticon (neither of which I got to go to) I thought it'd be nice to relax and just show pictures of international cats.

The internet does have a 30% minimum requirement of cats and I am well below my share.
I don't want my internet rights revoked, so I'll get on with it.

Click the pictures to see them larger. Captions to give location & info about the cats.

2 of 4 kittens born while I was living in Minsk. There was a pride of cats who lived in the basement of the building and these kittens were born soon after my arrival. People in Minsk help out the wild cats: every building of flats have them. There was the coolest old couple who lived in the building who would sit out in the evening and feed the cats.

Not a wild cat, but my Minsk neighbor's cat. So curious, but afraid to cross that divide.

Kittens in Belovezhskaya Pushcha. They were very curious and playful.

Still milk-kittens though and mother was near & protective.

The ugliest cat I've seen. This was in Brect. At first I thought it was a gargoyle. It may be.

The cutest cat in Brect. Not wild, but couldn't resist putting her picture up.

We stayed & played with her at the window, her human came & laughed when she saw us.

A cat in Ephesus, Turkey. There are a lot of cats at the ruins.

Ruins seem like a perfect place to have wild cats. Reminds me of Logan's Run.

This one had a sibling.

Don't think they all just wait for handouts. This one was a real tiny tiger!

Having caught a chameleon she looks for a safe place to enjoy her meal.

Life goes on in the ruins: for some.

A couple wild cats in the inhabited town near the ruins of Ephesus.

Relaxed and confident, with reason! A cat in Kusadasi, Turkey.

A cat on the Marmara coast in Istanbul, Turkey.

This was a very friendly cat who did not want us to leave.

Have to admit I was very tempted to adopt this one.

But seems he has a good life: locals bring the cats chicken scraps!

Clearly this cat believes Istanbul is his.

But the Grand Bazaar is the domain of this one. He had a real bad attitude, but was fun.

He went where he liked, which was usually under the tables of market stalls in the halls,

where he'd suddenly lash out at people's ankles!

Wild cat in an Istanbul Mosque courtyard

This cat relaxed at Hagia Sophia

In Goreme, Turkey, this one beat the fierce heat by finding some shade.

There were always several wild cats beating the heat at the grocery store we frequented in Sudak, Ukraine, by the Black Sea.

Crimea had a lot of nice cats. Not a lot of people nice to them though.

3 of my favorites it seems I don't have pictures of: 2 young kittens who we'd buy food for who lived near the grocery store, and a beautiful extremely friendly black cat who I named 'Oshi' similar to 'ushistik' (spelling mangled I'm sure) which means 'big-eared' in Russian... for she did have humorous big ears.

A tiny wild kitten in the market at Sudak

So cute! I din't want to let her go.

Another tiny wild kitten. This one was too young to not have a mother, but it seems there was no mom.

People had made a shelter from a box and left food & milk for her, so it was nice to see some being kind to the wild cats. This one is not much bigger than the one above. I really wanted to keep her.

We visited her nearly every day when we walked by where she lived.

Not a wild cat, not even remotely, but I had to include Big Blue here.

He was relaxing at the ticket counter for the castle in Sudak. There is a video of him at the end.

A cat in Kiev, spying his next meal.

This cat in Yalta found an easier way to get food: go to the local internet location and order take out!

A couple movies to enjoy:

Two kittens playing at night in Istanbul:

The lazy blue cat in Sudak:

____________________________________________________________________This has been an A-Z Challenge post. For the month of April there will be an update for each letter within the theme of: Things that influence and inspire me, or the converse: things which I find distressing or make me want to rail at the world.Some of these will pertain to the miniatures hobby, but many will venture off to atypical territory for the duration of the challenge, then it will be back to normal with mostly minis and an occasional blithering.You can find out more about the A-Z challenge my clicking the logo at the top left of the page.

9
comments:

You have traveled a great deal and I've never asked you how you've come to live in so many places. It may be in one of the blogs you wrote before I started following you. So, how did you come to travel so much?

These are some wonderful pictures and it's nice to see strays living in conditions where they aren't starving. I had a cat just like that lazy blue one. His name was Piggy and he lived to be 15 years old.

Anne: The only way I've been able to travel so much is, while here at home to live on the cheap & travel on the cheap too ;) Lived in both Denmark & China for a summer by a deal of free student housing, a cheap deal for the first China trip- actually, China is very affordable in general. Minsk was quite reasonable too. I packed everything here, put it into storage, brought over what I needed and rented my house while I was in Minsk: the extra from the renters over the mortgage payed for most of my expenses there. I was going to go back to stay there the next year, but the country went into an economic tailspin-far worse than here: between the currency devalue & inflation the money is worth 1/3 what it was but people get paid the same face value as before, and the politics are equally as bad: It wasn't so bad before the economic dive- now Luke has gone from trying to walk the line between being controlled by Russia & turning over everything to the west by selling what is left o the country's birthright to Russia, so he can hang on to a semblance of power... selfish and dumb. So that's out. When I left Belarus at the end of the max visa time we traveled on the cheap- can get some good deals. Most Americans don't travel and don't know how to, they pay a fortune to have 'america oversees' which is several kinds of foolish. I'm a natural born cheap-ass and don't have fancy tastes so I find traveling agrees with me.

Bill: pretty sure that grey kitten in the Sudak market may actually be a hamster ;)

Alberta: thanks for stopping by! Yes, almost done- just haven't decided what Z will be yet.